Improving Oral Language Skills for American Indian Secondary School Students.

Sharpes, Donald K.

Endeavoring to combat the persistent problems of low achievement, poor reading skills, and nagging absenteeism, the Intermountain Inter-Tribal High School, an American Indian boarding school in Utah, developed a project whose primary mission was to reduce substantially the number of students scoring below the acceptable norm in grade equivalency on oral language skills. The preliminary phase of the project, conducted during the 1981-82 school year, collected the following data on student learning needs: test scores from the Oral Language Test of the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory, test scores from the California Achievement Test, and student perception scores of their own native language speaking and understanding ability and of their English speaking and understanding ability. Analyses of scores produced the following preliminary findings: (1) most students admitted to the oral language project really were deficient in language skills (many of those in the ninth grade tested at sixth grade reading levels); (2) there was a positive correlation between student reading level, overall language ability, and oral language proficiency; and (3) most students were moderately proficient in their native language, with some indications of language interference problems due to the learning of English. (RL)